Cyprian’s
Legacy
Cyprian not only started the Church
of Rome thinking about the implications of Matthew 16:18-19. He also and
equally inadvertently left as a legacy a paradox which, but for the conversion
of Constantine, might well have worked in favour of the bishop of Rome’s claims.
ON the one hand, he emphasized the unity of the Church: ‘There is one God and
one Christ, and one Church belonging to him and one faith, and a people joined
together by the bond of concord into the complete unity of one body.’ On the
other hand, when it came to validity of baptism by heretics and schismatics,
his view was that each bishop should decide for himself. He thought heretical
baptism was invalid but Stephen thought it was valid, so each could go their
own way.
There were problems with that,
and together they were likely to point to an ultimate authority as a solution.
For one thing, the issue was not trivial: it was about the nature of the
sacraments of baptism and who was included in the Christian community. This
issue would tear African Christianity apart in the fourth century. Donatists,
like Cyprian, thought that baptism depended on the status of the one who
administered it. Men who had surrendered the scriptures when ordered to do in
the persecution under Diocletian were unable to administer the sacrament.
Then there was the problem of
geographical mobility. Bishops might have agreed to differ in their
congregations could be counted on to stay in their city. But that was far from
the case. There was an enormous amount of geographical mobility in the Roman empire.
Would someone have to go through the catechumenate (preparation for baptism)
afresh if they arrived from another city and a community regarded as heretical
and schismatic? Given the amount of movement around the empire, the question
must have arisen often.
The combination of uncertainty
about an issue so fundamental as baptism, and geographical mobility such that
different city Churches could not simply each create their own tradition on the
issue without internal tensions, was bound to put unity under strain.
Christians moving from one city to another would not be happy to find fundamental
assumptions of their former Church rejected in their new community. But Cyprian
wanted to have both unity and freedom of bishops to decide key issues
themselves. He left a legacy of cognitive dissonance between his strongly felt
belief in unity between bishops and his no less strong insistence on bishops’
liberty to go their own way, and left hanging in the air the question of how to
reconcile these two ideas. The ideological legitimation he unwittingly
suggested to the Roman Church pointed to a way to deal with the dissonance,
even though the immediate reaction to Stephen’s claims seems to have been widespread
rejection.
Instead, a different path to
unity emerged: Constantine’s. As noted, it was Constantine who summoned the
first general council, starting a tradition of governance by great councils
with an emperor behind them to bang episcopal heads together and get agreement.
Only after that became too difficult in the West, because of the barbarian problem,
did the Roman church resume its late third-century trajectory.
Erich Caspar’s counterfactual
argument thus rests on two interpretative pillars. First, Cyprian of Carthage
unwittingly and unwillingly set in motion a movement towards papal authority.
Secondly, he showed how Constantine cut it short: that contrary to appearance the
conversion of Constantine was a setback to the Roman Church. (D. L. d’Avray, Debating
Papal History, c. 250-c. 1300: Responsive Government and the Medieval Papacy [Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2025], 30-31)
